Abstract

Due to recent advances in high throughput techniques, we and others have generated multiple proteomic and transcriptomic databases to describe and quantify gene expression, protein abundance, or cellular signaling on the scale of the whole genome/proteome in kidney cells. The existence of so much data from diverse sources raises the following question: "How can researchers find information efficiently for a given gene product over all of these data sets without searching each data set individually?" This is the type of problem that has motivated the "Big-Data" revolution in Data Science, which has driven progress in fields such as marketing. Here we present an online Big-Data tool called BIG (Biological Information Gatherer) that allows users to submit a single online query to obtain all relevant information from all indexed databases. BIG is accessible at http://big.nhlbi.nih.gov/.